Anyone who ever stood up for principle and paid for it in pain will mourn the passing of Morgan Tsvangirai, the man who never wanted to be president but wore himself out trying on behalf of his suffering people.
Tsvangirai, who succumbed to colon cancer in a Johannesburg hospital on February 14, never wanted the power that many leaders in Africa crave. His heart was in his humble rural roots in Buhera in eastern Zimbabwe – where he was born the eldest of nine children to a miner – and in the trade union movement. Tsvangirai followed his father down the mine and when independence came, in 1980, he joined the ruling party, Zanu-PF, and rose swiftly through the ranks becoming a staunch supporter of President Robert Mugabe. History is littered with such ironies.
It was as head of the mighty Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions that Tsvangirai enjoyed his annus mirabilis at the head of hundreds of thousands of workers. With his trademark cowboy hat, he could hold a crowd with fiery oratory and hold a strike in place against the odds. With a handful of faxes he could close the country down, which he did in 1997 and 1998 with mass stay-aways as economic hard times and President Mugabe’s indifference hurt the people.
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It was this skill that led him up the greasy pole of politics; yet, even in his pomp you could tell that he didn’t want to.
One hot afternoon, in 1998, amid a spate of strikes, my TV crew and I received a frantic call from Tsvangirai’s office for us to come and save him. By this time, he had raised the ire of thugs loyal to Zanu-PF, calling themselves war veterans, who stormed his office and tried to throw him out of a third-floor window. Tsvangirai asked his secretary to call us instead of the police because, sadly, in the politically charged atmosphere, he didn’t trust them.
Luckily, as we arrived, the thugs fled. As we calmed Tsvangirai down, I asked him why he didn’t go ahead and run for president as he had the power of the workers at his elbow.
“No, Chris, if you run for president even your grandchildren will be persecuted,” said Tsvangirai.
And so it turned out. Activists shepherded Tsvangirai into forming the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), setting into motion years of vilification, intimidation and abuse that left him battered and bloody in mind and body. Tsvangirai tried to keep his feet on the ground through his stable home life. In the early days he used to hold press conferences in his front garden where his charming wife, Susan, who died tragically in a car accident in 2009, used to bring us tea with a smile.
Yet, worse times came after tea. Tsvangirai, egged on by the west, became the world’s champion against the growing horror of Mugabe and paid for it by being arrested, beaten and charged with treason. Even the Mugabe-leaning judges in Harare dismissed the trumped-up charges.
Undoubtedly Tsvangirai won the presidential elections against Mugabe in 2008, but the conniving election authorities refused to release the results. Thus stolen election led to a power-sharing agreement, the following year, under which Tsvangirai became a pretty much powerless deputy president. He was never to reach the top spot not that, deep down, it really bothered him.
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Those who had stood against the bullies and suffered may prefer to remember Tsvangirai by another tale related by one of my colleagues in Zimbabwe.
A top level delegation of MDC officials had gone to see their political counterparts in Zambia. Zanu-PF apparatchiks in Harare lent on the Zambian government to deport them and the MDC group ended up stranded and angry under a tree, with phones with flat batteries, on the Zimbabwe side of the Chirundu border. Tsvangirai’s colleagues attacked their leader under the branches of the tree.
“What is the point of this political movement?” says one.
Tsvangirai seized the moment and ordered his empty-pocketed colleagues to sing as they marched to a village a few kilometers away. A few hours later, villagers were surprised to see Tsvangirai, in full voice, walking into their village at the head of a phalanx of suited comrades. A cell phone in the village summoned transport and they drove home in good spirits.
A fleeting taste of the leadership that Zimbabwe was destined to never see.

Morgan Tsvangirai: The quiet man forced into the wrong job

I don’t think [Morgan] Tsvangirai is the number one enemy of the state, I think I am because I sing against the government,” says Thomas Tafirenyika Mapfumo, a rebel musician and African to the tip of his dreadlocks as we sit for a tête-à-tête in Newtown, Johannesburg, on one of his rare visits to the continent of his birth.
Famed author, musicologist and journalist, Banning Eyre, in his book Lion Songs, describes Mapfumo as the Lion of Zimbabwe who stands beside Fela Kuti, Youssou N’Dour and Franco as one of Africa’s greatest musicians.
“He is on par with some of the greatest musicians to come out Africa and what makes his music even more important is that it helped liberate Southern Rhodesia from [Ian] Smith’s racist rule. His music galvanized liberation forces. His interest has never been commercial but to raise consciousness, that is why he got into trouble when he sang Corruption, attacking Mugabe’s rule,” says African music expert, Richard Nwamba.
Mapfumo is as much a sharp social commentator as a musician. It is this dissent that forced one of Zimbabwe’s finest musicians to seek refuge in the United States (US) in 2005. He has even sung a song praising his hosts: We love America, everyone wants to be there. The feeling is mutual. In the US he received an honorary doctorate degree from Ohio University.
At the age of 70, Mapfumo looks frail but he hasn’t dropped the habits of his wild youth: smoking, cracking jokes and making condescending remarks about other musicians.
It’s been a full life for Mapfumo, who grew up with his grandparents in Marondera, Mashonaland East, about 72 kilometers east of Harare and a million miles from the rest of the world.
Mapfumo’s grandfather played the mbira, a metal keyed instrument, and hosho, a percussion instrument. The two instruments provide the beat to Mapfumo’s music.
“I was herding cattle at the age of seven while my parents stayed in the city. I joined them in the early sixties to attend school in Salisbury’s (now Harare) township of Mabvuku,” he recollects on a meandering walk through his music career.
“In the city I started listening to radio as we didn’t have that luxury in the countryside. I used to listen to Kwela Kwela, Jazz 9, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, Franco, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra,” he says.
“I think I was born a musician, it was within me.”
At the age of 16, Mapfumo joined a band called Zutu Brothers, who wanted him to sing rock and roll, like Otis Redding and Elvis Presley.
“I was a very good rock and roller, I used to rock,” he chuckles.
This clashed with his parents’ beliefs.
“My parents were church people, my father was a choir leader and my mother played a leading role in the women’s league.”
There was no stopping Mapfumo.
“From Mabvuku we moved to Mbare where I joined a music group called Cosmic Four Dots and I was still singing rock and roll music. However our music genre was not consistent as we changed with the times, partly due to the influence of the Beatles and John Lennon.”
Mapfumo says it was during this time he sang his first song in his mother tongue, called Shungu Dzinondibaya (Passion Kills Me). It was recorded in a house in Mbare by a passing producer who worked for the Rhodesia Broadcasting Corporation.
“While visiting a grocery shop I heard the song being played on the radio. I never got a cent out of that song,” Mapfumo laughs.
“I then started asking myself questions… I realized that my identity was in singing the music of the people I grew up with. A lot of people thought I was losing my mind when I started mbira music with the band Acid.”
The band was named Acid because of its corrosive social commentary.
One of the songs was Pamuromo Chete (It’s Just Talk). Mapfumo says the song was an instant hit because its lyrics reflected dissent against Smith’s white minority rule in the then Rhodesia.
“We were responding to his utterances that Zimbabwe will never have a black government in his lifetime or in a thousand years.”
Mapfumo decided to form a group called Blackman Unlimited that transformed to the present day line-up called Blacks Unlimited. He started the group with his uncle and the musicians; Marshall Munhumumwe, Leonard Chiyangwa and Jonah Sithole.
By then, Mapfumo had moved from Salisbury to Mutare, then called Umtali, a small town of the eastern border with Mozambique. On Fridays, they would play at bus stops.
“We used to play music for people getting off the buses from the city. I was the highest paid person in the band earning eight pounds per week. In Mutare we worked for a businessman called Murapa but the group later disintegrated over payment issues,” he says.
The crunch came when Mapfumo asked Murapa for the band’s money.
“‘You haven’t yet played’, said Murapa when I asked for money after working for two weeks. The band members were disappointed and left for Harare.”
As his career progressed, Mapfumo realized he needed to sing in the language of his people.
In the 1970s, he met a musician who would become a big name in Africa. His name was Oliver Mtukudzi
“Oliver had his song called Red For Stop And Green For Go. I asked him, ‘why don’t you sing in Shona and do your lyrics in Shona?’” chuckles Mapfumo. Remember what we said about condescending?
As the liberation war came to a close, Smith accused Mapfumo of promoting insurgency with his music.
“In 1979, I was arrested by the Smith government and I was put into detention at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison for three months. I was released on condition that I went to sing at Muzorewa’s rally, this was during the internal settlement,” says Mapfumo.
The internal settlement, an agreement to end the civil war, was signed on March 3, 1978 by Smith and moderate nationalist leaders Abel Muzorewa; Ndabaningi Sithole and Jeremiah Chirau.
Mapfumo was opposed to it but was forced to compromise. As a bargain for his release he had to sing at Muzorewa’s rally. Muzorewa, a Methodist priest, was seen as a sell-out by liberation forces.
“Our weapon is our music, let’s go and sing what we have been singing all along,” he told his band. It was not that simple.
Mapfumo says the state-owned Herald newspaper pictured him next to Muzorewa and soon liberation fighters saw him as a sell-out too. Despite this, Mapfumo was asked to play at the birth of Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980 on the same bill as Bob Marley.
“On celebration day we were treated like enemies, we were made to perform last when all the dignitaries had gone. We played for the real people who fought the war.”
Mapfumo thought things would change when Robert Mugabe took over. He was wrong.
He sang against Mugabe’s administration in the late 1980s as corruption took root. He also sang in praise of Mozambique’s president, Samora Machel, for fighting apartheid. He sang against the then president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, a classic called Tongosienda. The apartheid era leader would have needed an interpreter as Mapfumo sang in Shona. Mapfumo became a persona non grata in South Africa.
“Back home I started singing against corruption, economic malaise and people getting land without knowledge of farming,” he says.
He sang that land reform was a flop in a hit called Maiti Kurima Hakunetsi (you thought farming was easy).
Thirty five years on from the birth of Zimbabwe, Mapfumo is adamant, despite threats from the Mugabe administration, he is not going to stop singing about social issues.
His music is banned on state radio stations back home and promoters fight shy of bringing him to perform for his people. He now keeps up the spirits of his fellow countrymen who left Zimbabwe for the same reasons as him by performing shows around the world.
“We haven’t looked back, we have been with the people and we will always be with them.”
After our hour-long interview, with endless insistence by his manager Austin Sibanda that I should wrap up to allow the old man to take a smoke before he talks to his relatives who have traveled from Zimbabwe, I asked when he is going to perform back home.
“I am ready to perform in Zimbabwe but there are no promoters prepared to be associated with me, I also have to be careful with the situation.”
Mapfumo fears for his life. He says intelligence operatives who are fans of his music keep him informed.
While frozen out at home, Mapfumo is taking his music to Africa. In October, he performed at the Defense and Security Forces celebrations of Mozambique in Chimoio, Beira and Tete. Clearly, he hasn’t yet upset the government of Mozambique.
Those gigs followed the two he played in Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa, where it’s believed more than a million Zimbabweans live. The Johannesburg gig was packed with Zimbabweans, both black and white, shoulder to shoulder with a few South Africans.
Throughout the show, most sang along, chanting ‘Mukanya’, the totem of Mapfumo. There were many familiar faces in the crowd. Dewa Mavhinga, a human rights lawyer and activist, looked as happy as a lawyer can be.
“The old man is still good, hey,” says Mavhinga as Mapfumo sang his last song of the night.
It’s unlikely to be the last for the 70-year-old Mapfumo, who has straddled Africa and the vast gap between Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley. Clearly the rebel with a cause is just getting started.

Is this  Zimbabwe’s Public Enemy Number One?

“We will not legitimize the illegitimate.”
This was the reaction to a questionable election victory in Zimbabwe from the loser, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister of the fragile power-sharing government.
After President Robert Mugabe’s win, on July 31, Tsvangirai accused the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission of rigging the poll and indicated that his party would take legal action. The MDC dropped the case as they felt they would not get a fair trial.
<div id="attachment_2094" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2094" class="size-medium wp-image-2094" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/0000196003-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />HARARE, ZIMBABWE &#8211; AUGUST 2: Morgan Tsvangerai on August 2, 2013, in Harare, Zimbabwe. It was announced that ZANU PF leader, Robert Mugabe has once more won the elections. (Photo by Gallo Images / Foto24 / Herman Verwey)</div>
Questionable electoral conduct has been cited in more than 100 constituencies, where thousands of voters were turned away. Names were not appearing on the voters roll, others found their names on the roll in far-flung constituencies. Intimidation was subtle, but rife, according to reports.
“It’s a huge farce,” said Tsvangirai as counting began.
Harare, the capital, went quiet when the result emerged. There were no celebrations.
Tendai Biti, MDC secretary general, lashed out at the ruling party, questioning its conduct during the elections.
“We live in horrible times surrounded by horrible men—men we have always assumed human, rational and real—they are not&#8230; The thing is, we always assume that revolutionary parties (ZANU-PF) have a conscience or a limit. They do not. For power, they will do anything. When dealing with them, always budget for the irrational, for the insane. Any assumption of sanity is wrong and naïve. They have stolen this election to the extent that they themselves are embarrassed,” says Biti.
“[Since the election date] we have been walking like zombies, drowning in dark shadows of pain and disbelief, hoping that this is just a nightmare. I’m afraid it’s real. Can someone in Borrowdale Road show me hands and say we voted ZANU-PF? Maybe you are at Sam Levy (a popular shopping center). Please get in touch if you are out there,” pleads Biti.
Economic commentator Jonathan Kadzura says: “There is nothing abnormal or controversial about the election. The losers must eat humble pie and let the nation move ahead. A Zanu-PF government is going to have people-oriented policies that are geared towards job creation. Agriculture is the backbone of our economy [which] we are going to revive [to] get the economy kicking, whether people like the results of the election or not.”
But President Robert Mugabe appears to be a hard sell for business—as trading resumed after the election win, the bourse took a nosedive, losing 11% of its value in one day. The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange is valued at around $6 billion and experts predict troubled trading times ahead.
Talk is rife about the manipulation of the voters roll, which was only made available on polling day. It was made available to the MDC after a High Court order was granted, but there wasn’t any previous commitment to make it open for inspection, even to international observers present.
“So far, we haven’t dispatched our observers, we don’t have a copy of the voter roll,” said Bernard Member, of the SADC Observer Mission, before the poll.
President Mugabe apologized for what he called “hitches” that kept the voters’ roll under wraps. He denied that his party was working in collusion with the registrar general’s office to manipulate the electoral register in favor of his party.
“We don’t do such things,” he says.
Unexpectedly, strongholds of the MDC in the cities were won over by Zanu-PF, making many voters suspicious.
After suffering an electoral setback in the 2008 polls, in which Mugabe gathered a mere 43% of the first round of the presidential vote, he turned the tables, and garnered 61% five years later. The miraculous setback of his main rival Morgan Tsvangirai, garnering 34%—against 47% five years earlier—is an electoral trend that has defied analysis.
As the country limps into another term with Mugabe at the helm, without the full support of western capital, analysts warn of economic stagnation.
“There is hope, if there is a shift in economic policies,” says Eric Bloch, an economic commentator. “There is need for foreign direct investment [and] curtailing of government expenditure. They will have to [have] the courage to make fundamental changes, that can boost the confidence of the market.”
“The win by Zanu-PF is sending shivers in the market, considering the mainstay of the party’s slogan on indigenization of foreign owned companies. The policy has no takers going forward. With the liquidity crunch hitting the world, we will have investors, especially foreign investors with little appetite to try to engage the market, which is risky—like Zimbabwe,” says Christopher Mugaga, of Economiter Global Capital, a financial consultant group in Harare.
“The onus is upon Mugabe to set up a cabinet, which is not military or militant, but rather made of technocrats.”
The cry from both parties during the campaigns was for job creation, resuscitation of industry and health. If Mugabe fails on this front, the chances of his party surviving another vote are slim, given the restless and growing number of youths without jobs.
The indigenization policy—where foreign-owned companies are being forced to sell stakes—are said to be benefiting a mere handful of close associates of Mugabe’s party. Foreign-owned companies have to be approved by the Ministry of Indigenization and Economic Empowerment. The policy is legally questionable as it affects the enshrined freedom of association and interferes with guaranteed property rights. The legal experts call it a broad legislative framework, prone to many legal interpretations, which can be abused for political expediency.
“This scares investors leaving them with no option, except to stay away,” says Mugaga.
“Zimbabwe is not going to die&#8230; The MDC-led Treasury in the previous government did not want agriculture to succeed, but this Zanu-PF government is going to invest more in agriculture, making the availability of inputs to new farmers a priority so that they will produce sufficient raw materials, leading to the production of locally produced products, which will substitute the imports that we have seen on our supermarkets. Industry will expand. Zanu-PF government is going to focus on job creation, resuscitation of closed textile industries, [and] provide loans for the youths to start their businesses. Our market is awash with Chinese products. We want locally produced goods that with a reasonable price range for locals,” says Kadzura.
Despite this promise of better days, there is more anxiety and hopelessness in Harare these days, than celebration and hope.

Tag: Morgan Tsvangirai

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Morgan Tsvangirai: The quiet man forced into the wrong job

Is this Zimbabwe’s Public Enemy Number One?

“We Live In Horrible Times Surrounded By Horrible Men”